Law and Society Commons^™

Medical-Legal Partnership As A Model For Access To Justice, Yael Cannon

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The United States is plagued with a “justice gap” that leaves many Americans with unmet civil legal needs. Americans with low income do not receive the legal help they require for as many as 92% of their substantive civil legal problems. The justice gap requires many legal aid agencies to triage, becoming “emergency rooms” for clients with unmet legal needs. This national crisis calls for new innovations so that access to justice (A2J) can function more like primary care, promoting better use of resources and preventing legal crises that can cause long-lasting harm.

Medical-Legal Partnerships (MLPs) embed lawyers in healthcare …

Health Inequalities, Lawrence O. Gostin, Eric A. Friedman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The vast health inequalities in the United States and beyond that COVID-19 makes glaringly evident are frequently masked by aggregate statistics, which for years had been showing health improvements. Yet these improvements were inequitably distributed, with benefits disproportionately going to wealthier – and in the United States, white – populations. Globally, vast health inequities also exist among and within countries. The inequalities, which have also helped fuel the rise of populism, extend far beyond health care, including to wealth and income. Disaggregated, granular data is critical to understanding these inequalities.

Addressing health inequities must extend far beyond universal access to …

Supervised Injection Facilities: Legal And Policy Reforms, Lawrence O. Gostin, James G. Hodge, Chelsea L. Gulinson

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that more than 70 000 deaths from drug overdoses occurred in 2017, including prescription and illicit opioids, representing a 6-fold increase since 1999. Innovative harm-reduction solutions are imperative. Supervised injection facilities (SIFs) create safe places for drug injection, including overdose prevention, counseling, and treatment referral services. Supervised injection facilities neither provide illicit drugs nor do their personnel inject users. Supervised injection facilities are effective in reducing drug-related mortality, morbidity, and needle-borne infections. Yet their lawfulness remains uncertain. The Department of Justice (DOJ) recently threatened criminal prosecution for SIF operators, medical personnel, …

Disrupting The Path From Childhood Trauma To Juvenile Justice: An Upstream Health And Justice Approach, Yael Cannon, Andrew Hsi

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A groundbreaking public health study funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Kaiser Foundation found astoundingly high rates of childhood trauma, including experiences like abuse, neglect, parental substance abuse, mental illness, and incarceration. Hundreds of follow-up studies have revealed that multiple traumatic adverse childhood experiences (or “ACEs”) make it far more likely that a person will have poor mental health outcomes in adulthood, such as higher rates of depression, anxiety, suicide attempts, and substance abuse. Interestingly, the original ACE Study examined a largely middle-class adult population living in San Diego, but subsequent follow-up studies …

Mapping The Issues: Public Health, Law And Ethics, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The field of public health is typically regarded as a positivistic pursuit and, undoubtedly, our understanding of the etiology and response to disease is heavily influenced by scientific inquiry. Public health policies, however, are shaped not only by science but also by ethical values, legal norms, and political oversight. Public Health Law and Ethics: A Reader (expanded and updated 2nd ed., 2010) probes and seeks to illuminate this complex interplay, through a careful selection of government reports, scholarly articles, and court cases together with discussion and analysis of critical problems at the interface of law, ethics, and public health. The …